December 12 2003

In the next
major release of the Rational tools suite,
due next year, IBM will link the Rational tools with its WebSphere application
server, which is used to run Java applications, and with its Tivoli systems
management product, said Mike Devlin, general manager of IBM's Rational
division.
This closer integration will help companies
track problems in deployed applications and make design and code changes
more quickly, he said. The follow-on version of next year's major
release will increase the integration with the Tivoli set of systems-monitoring
tools and inherit some collaboration capabilities from IBM's Lotus line,
Devlin said.
The central point of integration for IBM's
tools is Eclipse,
an open-source tool effort the company started in late 2001. The Eclipse
consortium, which now has close
to 50 members, is set to become an independent organization with its own
board by the end of the year, according to Eclipse. The Eclipse software
is a system for combining several different development tools under a single
user interface.